Modeling help!

I got tired of trying to make complicated and dificult warcraft 3 units.
So i came up with a character my bro had invented as a young boy, heres the texture.



Iam using Milkshape 3D. I want to learn how to do the folowing things.
1. Make "papers" those planes that always are facing the camera.
2. Make animated texture polygons, the hands of the character will be electric rays, so i made the hands planes, and i want them to play a electric ray animation.
3. (War3 Model Editor or Milkshape i dont know..) I want to substitute the light green parts of the texture, by the famous team color. How do i do it? i know it can be done because the spirit wolf has strange things in his back, and a similar team color placigng can be done in this case.

Thanks fr helping.

Although this may not be a model editing issue, I'm moving the thread to the mdl editing corner because our local Milkshape expert, Rao Dao Zao lives there and he'll be able to answer.

~Moved~

Though I'd say this is a lot more model editing than Milkshape based, here goes...

"Papers" -- create a 2D plane facing the front (easiest way is to create a "box" primitive and ditch everything except the correct side), and attach it to a bone. Once you export, you can either go to the MDL and add the line "Billboarded," to that bone, or use Magos' and tick the "Billboarded" option in the bone.

Animated textures have to also be added in manually. I can't remember all the syntax off the bat, so I'd recommend using Magos' to create the animation (and probably a GlobalSequence to go along with it), and then go to the MDL and add the line "TVertexAnimId X," to the material that is supposed to handle the animating texture (where X is the ID of your tvertexanim... Probably 0).

I'll see if I can dredge up some examples for that when I get home, it's quite complicated.

Team colour is a slightly funky combination of material layers; pretty much cut and paste and you're done. Again, I don't have the code here, but I can find it if nobody else does when I get home. Take a peek in any normal WC3 unit model, you should see a material with two layers, one having the main skin and one having the line "ReplaceableId 1," (or is it 0? I can never remember). You'll also need to add an alpha channel to your skin (or modify the existing one), but I'll leave that to the skinning squad.

Well, thanks, in the paper issue, we are partially done.
About those animated textures, i will ask you later. Wat I didn't understand very well, is the team color thingy. Well, I know I can make a texture with X name, and then in Mago's change it for Replaceable ID 1 (Team Color, because 0 = transparent). But what i don't get is how to apply like strange figures, like the green part of the face in the texture i published, in team color, and the eyes and mouth stay untouchable? I tryed to get it from an example, (Spiritwolf) That has like strange figures in his back, but the only thing i got was that you need 2 layers, 1. Texture, 2. Replaceable, but i saw no evidence of this strange marks in the back in Model Editor. I tryed to import into milkshape, if i saw something there. But really i didnt.

PS: what is ditch? if bone = joint, then, does it has to be a specific bone?, because i attached the paper and a 3d bow to a single joint, and what i don't want is the bow to turn into a paper, lol.

"Ditch" is a colloquial term, in this case meaning "get rid of", "remove" or "delete". Do excuse me.

Yes, the terms "bone" and "joint" are interchangeable (as far as we are concerned). You assign the vertices that you want to be billboarded to one bone, and billboard that; the rest can go wherever you want; presumably the rest of the skeleton.

Team colour needs some work on the skin as well; as I said, the alpha channel. What program are you using for skinning? I can only help in this area for Paint Shop Pro 7; otherwise, you'll need to ask again at the skinning forum. Milkshape isn't very good at doing transparency/etc with alpha channels, so you'll have to work as best you can without them and then implement the team colour after exporting.


That should get you decent team colour, as long as your alpha channel is set up correctly (and the appropriate geosets are pointing to this material, and all that).

Well, iam actualy skinning in Photoshop 7.0
I guess i don't know then how to paint in alpha channels. But if you would like to, i can send you the skinn to your email, and you paint the green areas into the alpha channel we are going to use, that i prefer not to be black, because the mouth silouettes are black, and i want them to stay as they are.
Thanks, you are xtremely help full. In Guesst's post, i noticed some new tricks, so that was also helpfull.

PS: Can a box be a billboard? I find that it will be more usefull to make paper boxes inthe case of my characters hands

[i]Anything[i] that can be attached to a bone can be billboarded. But it's not really worth doing more than a plane that faces the camera; since the stuff behind won't really be seen.

Better that you ask for help in the skinning section; somebody with Photoshop will surely be able to teach you how to do it.

Guesst olready showed me how to put the alpha black thingy. What I don't know is why doesn't it work? I commented "Transparent" in the material (Milkshape3D) but it didn't work. Should the texture be in blp format for it to work?

If not, is there anyway to do it in Magos model editor?

Or about using your script, where do i add that? I can' open the model in notepad.

Script should be implemented with notepad, yes.

Read the sticky for the MS3D exporter for information on what commands are supported. Transparent isn't.

Use Magos' or Notepad; Windows -> Material Manager, double click on the material, double click on the layer, find the "Filtermode" combo box and change it to "Transparent." Or in Notepad, go to the material layer and change the line "Filtermode None," to "Filtermode Transparent," and that should activate it.